Why watching vile porn’s convinced me children MUST be shown it at school

Do we want our girls to think it’s OK to be handed around like a piece of meat?

PAGE after page of repulsive imagery pops up with the click of a mouse. The captions for each of these graphic pictures, most of which are unprintable here, give a clue as to the content of the porn films they so crudely advertise.

Wedding Night Surprise, College Threesome, Sexy Babysitter — the choice is endless, profoundly depressing and about as arousing as a dip in a freezing cold sea.

As for the seedy scenarios that unfold when I click on the links, it’s hard to describe them in a way that is acceptable for a family newspaper. What is immediately clear is that there is no attempt to create a plot. None of that old-fashioned titillation where a woman waits at home for the washing machine repair man who is unexpectedly handsome and soon gets down to the real job in hand.

The first scene involves a woman and a group of eight men who gather around her, removing her clothes and manhandling her in a most brutal and painful manner while she, noisily, appears to find pleasure in being the subject of their attention.

A film marked ‘Romance’ is better-lit than most and there’s a little tenderness at the beginning with the man paying some attention to his partner’s pleasure. This doesn’t last long, though, and quickly it’s the man’s sexual needs that are prioritised.

The most appalling sequence I watch, though, is entitled Flexi Dolls. A man enters a hotel room carrying a large black sports bag. He unzips it and begins to unfold what looks at first like a mannequin.

It’s not. It’s a real woman who is laid on the bed and, while unspeakable things are done to her, has a completely blank expression on her face.

It makes me think of all those poor young women who’ve been drugged or drunk and raped without any consent on their part at all. I find it so disturbing, I hate to think even of consenting adults watching this, let alone teenagers.

Porn this brutal should surely be banned — yet it was available for free on a device almost every child has access to.

What worries me most is not what grown men and women choose to watch, but that seeing these images often forms a teenager’s first sexual experience. For the sad truth is that, according to research presented last week at the Oxford Union, 70 per cent of teens have watched pornographic material as dehumanising as this, if not even worse.

What’s more, research carried out by the National Union of Students revealed that internet porn is now the main source of sex education for young people from the age of 12 — with 60 per cent admitting they get their information about sex from such dark, debauched sources.

And yet, when I recently made what I realise is a radical suggestion — that schools should be using examples of pornography in class to teach young people how to distinguish between this distorted online reality and reallife sex and relationships — I was shouted down.

Even though it’s clear that the current model of sex education in schools is failing to protect our children from this insidious online threat.

My proposal was that teenagers from, say, the age of 15 upwards should be taught how to analyse pornography in the safety of a well-run classroom, as they would with any other cultural phenomenon they need to understand. I really didn’t want to check out the material myself but, having made such a proposal, I realised that I must — and it shocked me to the core to think children are watching this kind of material on their own and taking it all at face value. And has what I saw changed my mind about my proposal to show pornography in class? No, it’s made me even more convinced I’m right. That young people are harmed by viewing porn is indisputable and yet it’s terrifyingly easy to access — as I discovered when I spent a morning, with a colleague, viewing the type of material that children can watch on a computer, smartphone or tablet with no demand for payment or proof of age. I’ve had serious concerns about pornography for a long time, ever since campaigners such as Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon and Linda Boreman — ‘star’ of the infamous blue movie Deep Throat under the name Linda Lovelace — tried to get it banned as a form of human trafficking because ‘women were presented dehumanised as sexual objects’. I saw Deep Throat and a couple of old-style videos — for research purposes — and could not have agreed more with those women. But that was more than 30 years ago. Back then, it was not easy to get hold of the stuff and the films were nowhere near as humiliating as those that can be accessed now with the simple click of a mouse.

As a parent of two, now adult, sons, I’m relieved that, during their vulnerable years of puberty, they had nothing more technologically sophisticated than a Nokia mobile for phoning their friends.

If I had young children of either sex now, I would be deeply worried that their understanding of sexuality would become warped by what’s being watched.

The pornography I watched shows everything you would never want your girls to see. The women had no body hair at all. Their breasts remained unnaturally upright, regardless of their position, and were generally larger than is common.

Do we really want our girls to view their naturally maturing young bodies with distaste because they don’t look like the women in the films? Is it any wonder they often have low self-esteem?

Peggy Orenstein, the author of a new book, Girls And Sex, presents plenty of evidence of the damage being done by this online onslaught.

SHE interviewed young women aged between 15 and 20, who told her of boyfriends who asked why they didn’t make the exaggerated groaning noises made in the films. They all felt they were being forced into shaving their pubic hair and coerced into sex acts they didn’t want to do.

She concluded that many girls are getting no pleasure from sex.

They are, she says, merely giving a performance for the pleasure of boys and often don’t really like what they’re being asked to do, but feel ‘it’s not about me. It’s about him’.

It’s easy to see how they get these ideas, having watched some of the material out there. While the women in some of the examples appeared to be finding it exciting, it’s apparent to anyone with any maturity or experience that they’re only acting for the camera. Pinched nipples and brutal

manipulation, often carried out by more than one man with only one woman, is hardly conducive to the idea that a woman has as much right to tender pleasure as a man.

Do we really want our girls to think it’s OK to be handed around like a piece of meat? Or our boys to think that this is what love-making is?

And yet, academic Dr Fiona Vera-Grey, a research fellow specialising in the study of pornography at the University of Durham and founder of the Centre for Gender Equal Media, estimates that as many as one in every five children from 12 upwards in the UK has seen online pornography. This means, as she points out, that 1.4 million under-18s visit porn sites each month.

So, clearly, we are facing a huge problem, which is causing untold damage to the sexuality of young people, both boys and girls.

In her research, Dr Vera-Grey has noted the different ways boys and girls view porn, explaining that teenage boys tend to watch porn in groups to earn what she calls ‘man points’.

This is where they demonstrate their heterosexuality and masculinity to each other, fully aware that, in secondary schools, sexuality and gender are policed by contemporaries and any deviation is punished.

There’s some evidence that boys exposed to this kind of pressure have grave difficulties in forming an intimate sexual relationship with girls and any boy who may be gay is too ashamed to express his own sexual preference.

Some boys (and girls), she says, ‘do it for the lolz’ — that’s teen speak for laughs. They claim to find it amusing to ‘gross each other out’, sending each other examples of the most revolting scenes they can find.

It’s not difficult, as you view this stuff, to work out how quickly you might become hardened to the brutality that’s on show.

ACCORDING to Dr Vera-Grey, some boys have said they’ve found it entertaining and play it in the background while doing homework — ‘just like watching The Simpsons’.

Others are open about the fact they use it as an aid to masturbation and ‘as a tool to coerce, pressure and intimidate young women’.

So, what do we do to protect our young people from this advancing tide of horror where sex is divorced from any kind of relationship?

A world in which boys use porn as a twisted source of guidance about how to behave in the bedroom and girls fear being shamed if they express any different ideas about their sexual needs or desires?

Let me make my position on the education question quite clear. Despite being dubbed irresponsible by the NSPCC and providing a number of commentators with material with which to have a laugh about my proposal — ‘Oh, no! Not double porn again!’ — I have never suggested that sex education should be abolished, rather that it be re-named and re-evaluated.

Thus far, the only compulsory sex education for those aged 11 upwards is the biology of reproduction, which is taught as part of the science curriculum. That’s fine by me. What I would like to see is another compulsory subject called Gender Education. Taking the word ‘sex’ out of it might reassure those parents who withdraw their children from Sex and Relationship Education because they don’t want their kids to know about sex. As if that’s ever going to be possible!

Gender Education would cover the history of relationships between men and women in politics, the workplace and the home. For younger children, there would be discussions about consent — is it OK for a great aunt to give you a kiss or cuddle if you don’t want it?

Gender roles would be talked about. Why do people often disapprove of a girl who wants to play football, or a boy who likes to play with dolls?

For older children — late teenage, where they may well be embarking on their first sexual encounters — I have no difficulty with a carefully chosen pornographic film being shown in class by a well-trained teacher, who would then lead discussion of the gender issues raised.

We trust teachers to help our young people to analyse the culture that surrounds them, whether it be a Jane Austen novel, a popular TV programme, the difference between the Conservative and Labour parties or the way the same stories have a different spin in different newspapers.

Information is power. Pornography is a major part of the culture with which young people are faced. They have a right to be informed and to think critically about the images with which they may be confronted.

Someone needs to tell them that it’s not normal for all women to be shaved of body hair, to be treated roughly or molested by large groups of men.

These damaging falsehoods need to be challenged and teachers are in the ideal position to do it.

Our children are too precious to be left in ignorance of the pleasures of an intimate, joyful, trusting sexual relationship.